The Glass Man and The Heather Woman
by Tinhen
Summary: The war was over, but there were still those out to avenge their Lord's demise. Now, Blaise Zabini's world is contained in one room in a hospital, and Hermione Granger's world is like nothing you've seen before.
1. The Glass Man

T h e . G l a s s . M a n

Author: Tinuviel Henneth

Rating: PG-13, I suppose

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Summary: The war was over, but there were still those out to avenge their Lord's demise. Now, Blaise Zabini's world is contained in one room in a hospital, and Hermione Granger's world is like nothing you've seen before.

Note: These companion stories, written in July of this year, are the Blaise/Hermione ship's first official darkfic. A list of a few inspiration songs are after the story.

T h e . G l a s s . M a n

000

"I don't know his name," she murmurs. She presses her hand against the cool, black tile floor. It was my idea to have a dark floor in there. Too much white was blinding and I don't think that an absence of color was going to help her get better.

I know she isn't going to get better.

"I'm not doing this for you!" Later, she calls to the mirror. She can't see me on the other side but I know she knows I'm here. I'm always here. I sleep in this five-by-seven foot observation nook. I have a nice, soft blue sleeping bag I roll out at night. My entire world is inside the room I watch; it would be silly of me to try to continue on with my life.

When it first happened, people would ask me how I could do it, visiting her all the time, even though she couldn't make heads or tails of anything. They told me I was much braver than they were. That's a load of crap, of course, because I'm the biggest fecking coward in the world. It's not courage keeping me here, it's fear. I'm scared to death that if I leave she might snap back and I won't be there. Maybe I'll stray too far into the Muggle street and get run over by a lorry.

I know she isn't going to snap back, though. That's the funny thing. She's as gone as Alice Longbottom, except Alice Longbottom didn't have some man watching her day and night like she was an animal in a zoo. Welcome to the rebuilt St. Mungo's. Welcome to the Spell Damage floor.

I should explain why I'm here and why she's in a box. Why I sleep on the floor. Why she doesn't know me. Why I sleep on the floor. Seriously, though, it's to the point where I survive on vending machine coffee and stale donuts nicked from the desk down the hall. The candy-stripers and the Healer who's in charge of her all think I'm as mad her, staying here all the time, my hand against the glass. They don't understand how I can do it.

It's been four years. I've lived here, too, for three of those years. I don't remember what a mattress feels like under my back, or what real meat tastes like, or the crush of people in Diagon Alley on all sides. It's strange how the word "side" rearranges into "dies."

"I'm not doing this for you!" she's shrieking, but not at the mirror any longer. She's turned away so she doesn't have to look at her reflection. They don't know if she knows that it's her in the glass looking back at her, and I agree. She hates the image more than she resents me for being here, but I can't leave. I can't just leave her there, behind the glass.

She's wearing a pair of white cotton pants and a pale pink tee shirt. It's the most basic of ensembles, but it can't hurt her. Almost every morning I help dress her. Even though she doesn't know who I am exactly, I'm the only one she lets touch her. She's calm when I'm talking and when I'm in there and for a little while after I leave her, but only for so long and then she's violent again, agitated, restless. She doesn't have a bed in her little room, only a mattress and sheets. She destroyed the bed in one of her episodes. That's what Healer Mathers calls them. Episodes. I just can't wait for next season.

I just wish I could change the channel.

When it's time for her to eat, I go in and sit on the edge of the mattress while she sits on the floor with her tray and eats. Her meals are small because her episodes are sporadic and we never know when they're going to come back. Once, she was in the middle of eating steamed vegetables when it happened, and I ended up with a smear of carrot across my face. Someone had to tranquilize her so they could scrub the room down.

They can't afford to have her attack anyone, so she can't come into contact with strangers. That's why she's in solitary. It breaks my heart to see her sequestered, but she's not a catatonic. They can't sit her in a bin with all the other hatters. It doesn't work that way.

There isn't a stick of furniture in her room. She broke the chair, galvanized steel, into above five pieces. An orderly hadn't paid attention to the sign. He had to have one of the chair legs surgically removed from his shoulder.

I wish I could kill the bastard who did this to us. He didn't just destroy her, which was his plan. He destroyed me, too. I would have been the most loyal little Death Eater there was, but they made the same mistake they made a lot, the Dark side, and hurt someone I cared for. For a while I entertained thoughts of tracking him down and doing something similar, but of violence only comes more violence and it was a rare fit of Gryffindorism I exhibited in being the noble one. I quit my job and sold my flat and bought a sleeping bag and dedicated my entire existence to being the guy on the other side of the glass.

Only a moment has gone by since the last time she spoke. "I'm declining!" she screams, suddenly kneeling. "I'm declining!" She falls backwards to the floor and stares at the ceiling. "I swear I will!"

They wonder why I do this. There's no hope of a recovery. They tell me I'm wasting my life. Molly Weasley comes by sometimes, and sometimes she brings Hester, sometimes she doesn't. Hester doesn't understand; she's too little still. Molly is all the Mum Hester knows and can know, and my world has narrowed to tightly for even Hester to fit inside. Molly told me once that she knew that the odds were against her, and that out of seven, one was bound to be rotted. She wouldn't have picked her baby boy out of all of her choices, but sometimes a mother can only do so much. I don't blame her, but what I think can't absolve her own guilt. That's all on her head.

She told me, on a Hester visit, that she was worried about me. She brought a little chocolate cake for Hester's fourth birthday, and made me eat two servings. She said that she admired me so much but it disturbed her. She told me that she thought I was only alive anymore out of habit. "Don't you dream anymore?" she asked.

Truthfully, I haven't had a dream in years. The money I do have goes to a nightly supply of Dreamless Sleep, which is delivered at the same time my Daily Prophet is in the morning, right to the hospital. It's entirely possible that the potion is addictive, but I wouldn't know if I'm hooked because I haven't dared to go without it since I've been sleeping here. I don't ever tell Molly this. She would only worry more, and her attention needs to be focused on her grandchildren and adopted grandchildren, like Hester, who looks so much like her mother and not remotely like me.

We had a great relationship. We were at a ball. She was with him, the one who did it, and I was with some Ravenclaw Sixth Year. Her hair was up, I was wearing a borrowed robe, and she looked up at me with this grin. "You'll save me a dance, won't you?" she asked. I shrugged, mystified that the Head Girl was asking such a thing of me, lowly Slytherin (!) Keeper and resident nobody.

We danced three dances. She kept a running, nervous narrative and I listened. Apparently, she hadn't been accustomed to a male who listened entirely, not just biding his time until he could monopolize the conversation for himself. Truth is, I hate talking, about myself or otherwise. I can't think of anything more boring.

The war wasn't kind to any of us. I'm a half-blood, you see, and maybe that's what conditioned silence into me. Being a Slytherin tempers you a certain way, and when you don't have the inbred pedigree of a Malfoy or a Crabbe, you aren't even soapscum in Slytherin. When you don't live to have a crony on each side and, or have a bizarre fetish for pissing others off, you'd best just blend into the flagstones. The war, waged by a half-blood against the very people who sired him, was especially hard on my ilk. We couldn't figure which way to let ourselves be torn. In the end, I went with the girl I danced with at the ball, the Head Girl, the girl whose friend was her leader.

Like any Slytherin, I followed the path of least resistance. Like any Slytherin, I picked the side with the best outcome for me.

Is this outcome best?

Now, she's sitting against the wall, her chin tucked onto her knees. Her fingernails are charmed to stay short. Her hair is spelled into a tight ponytail and is trimmed every six weeks by Healer Mathers herself. She eats with a bewitched utensil that won't allow her to use it as a weapon. She's entirely quiet now, watching the clouds cast shadows across the sun as they pass by her window. There's a layer of chain-link fence between the two panes of glass, spelled to be Unbreakable.

She has never looked out the window, to my knowledge. I don't think she knows it's there. She never liked heights much.

Hester was born after it happened. They were worried what would happen during the birth, since she was so far gone. There wasn't enough human being left in her for her to have any maternal instincts. We had picked the name one night in a bookshop in Piccadilly, when she was seven months pregnant, so I didn't have to think when Hester was born. I wasn't able to take the baby, and thank God for Molly Weasley. I couldn't even take care of myself. My vision charms wore off from crying and forty-nine hours without sleep and I had to go back to wearing glasses. I was too fatigued to recast the charms. I lost forty-four pounds in two months, which I'm aware is completely unhealthy. I was somewhat chubby before it happened, because she liked that I was always warm and "squishy," but losing so much weight left me gaunt-faced and saggy-skinned. She would have hated it. I hated it myself, but I couldn't bring myself to eat.

I went to the memorials for all the war heroes that first year, before I gave up on the outside world. I didn't go to hers, but Molly took baby Hester. There was a big picture in the _Prophet_ of the two of them. The memorial for Harry Potter, who died six feet from where she stood, in a blaze of befitting green glory, was the worst by far. The one for Percy Weasley was somber and everybody cried for the spy who risked everything, including his family's love. Theodore Nott's memorial was a strange occasion full of the foremost figures in every circle that Theo had touched. Theo was quite a social butterfly. Even Broderick Bode's affair was almost cheerful in comparison to Potter's. One that didn't happen was the one for Ron Weasley, which is a pity because I would have fully gone. Apparently, the Wizarding world doesn't celebrate traitors.

I would have raised my glass to the man. I would have kissed Hester's forehead. I would have been in all the papers, as delusional to all as Gilderoy Lockhart. The point is, I honor the dead. That includes the dead who have trespassed against me.

The glass is smudged from me leaning my forehead against it so often. It's my altar of sorts, I suppose. I went with my Muggle mother to a church in Rome once. She knelt in front of a sea of candles in individual cobalt glass cups. She lit one candle, and then two, and then three, and then she closed her eyes. She stayed that way for a long time, I remember, and tears were streaming down her cheeks from under her lashes. I didn't ask what she was doing. My father would have been horrified that she had taken me to that place. They had an agreement that I was never to touch her religion. It wasn't any holy sort of experience to watch my mother light a few candles, have a cry, then take my hand again and go back into the Roman sunlight. It was startling to see the ocean of flickering light, though. She told me in explanation later that each light was a prayer and a person somewhere. I don't know if she was telling me the kind of truth a mother tells her child to make him appreciate the glory of God and the stars in the sky or just a sliver of her dogma, but it doesn't matter. That's the truth I've taken into my heart.

It happened on the twenty-eighth of May, a day full of lilies and sunlight. On June first, I was in a Roman cathedral, my forehead and sternum and shoulders slightly damp where a man in black robes dabbed me with water, lighting a candle, and then another. I lit one in a red glass cup, and one in a green. The man in the robes watched me and called me "Signore," and knew somehow that I was not a practiced Catholic. He didn't interrupt me, he didn't say anything else, just let me go about my grief.

The glass is my altar, then. Like my mother lighting candles and praying for people who need it--namely, my father; she prayed for him all the time-- I kneel before the glass and watch my life as it refuses to acknowledge its own reflection in the mirror.

"There aren't any lights in the world," she whispers before she sleeps.

000

Autumn's Monologue (From Autumn to Ashes)

Can't Not (Alanis)

Amen (Jewel)

Honestly Okay (Dido)

You Could Make a Killing (Aimee Mann)

I Know (Fiona Apple)

000

Dedicated to nobody because I'm not in the mood.

Posted 24 September, 2004 (written 13 July 2004)

--tinhen


	2. The Heather Woman

T h e . H e a t h e r . W o m a n

Author: Tinuviel Henneth

Rating: PG-13, I suppose

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

Summary: The war was over, but there were still those out to avenge their Lord's demise. Now, Blaise Zabini's world is contained in one room in a hospital, and Hermione Granger's world is like nothing you've seen before.

Note: These companion stories, written in July of this year, are the Blaise/Hermione ship's first official darkfic. A list of a few inspiration songs are after the story. Considering this one deals in metaphor first and foremost, feel free to tell me you're confused!

T h e . H e a t h e r . W o m a n

000

Everything was orange in one room, and paisley in another, and dark, murky, greenish-red in the third. The three rooms were in a string, each connected by one door, paisley sandwiched neatly between the orange and the greenish-red. In each room was a select and ill-grouped set of monochrome objects. Each object served a purpose, even the topiary that stood in the center of the paisley room. Each object had a reason to be where it was.

There was a curtained doorway that led outside from the paisley room to a wide field of heather. The curtain was a black, gossamer sheet that swirled and lifted with the slightest provocation. In the center of the field, halfway between the building and a stream juxtaposing the heather and a sand dune, stood a proud old paper birch. A swing hung from one of the highest branches, and it moved ever so gently with the breeze.

The sky was the palest blue above the field of heather and an angry purple-black over the desert. The tree's highest boughs pierced the sky and a brave climber could have ascended into the chambers in the clouds above if so inclined. There was no grass or heather in a certain radius around the base of the birch. There was a sun high in the northern end of the blue sky, and another, smaller, redder one setting in the western end of the same sky. There was little other light in the desert, but one always shined brilliantly.

On the structure's exterior wall, surrounding the curtained doorway, were thousands of still and moving photographs, colorless bar codes, scallop-edged postage stamps, and paper restaurant napkins with scrawled phone numbers and drink rings in varying colors. The color was in waves, and not a single square inch of the cerulean blue wall behind showed by itself. Some of the posters and gum wrappers tacked to the wall had come loose at a corner and flapped in the cool breeze that made the heather dance as well.

On the swing hanging from the birch, facing the structure, sat a teenage girl with smooth brown hair and blue eyes, a red Art-Deco 'H' pinned to her black sweater, next to a shining silver 'P' and a gleaming golden 'HG,' both of which were in an out-dated font. She was not smiling, and even though both hands were tightly curled around the hemp ropes supporting the swing, her eyes were fixated on the patch of naked dirt under her bare feet. She wore a petunia-pink pencil skirt with a silvery belt, the black sweater, and dozens of silver bangles around her wrists. The girl was always there, on the swing. She never actually swung, just sat there and stared, at the ground or at the sky. Even though she faced the building, she never looked at it. She spoke sometimes, but the words never made it past the ring of bare earth surrounding her. She was in a vacuum.

A little boy, scarcely eleven years old, stood on the roof of the building, his messy dark hair gleaming wine-red in the setting sun's light. He faced due east, his cheek turned to the girl as if he hated her but wanted to keep her within his sights out of mistrust. He held a turtle and a ruby walking stick, and an intricate silver machine clung to the slate shingles at his feet with snakelike fangs. He had a noble look about him, even though he wore an oversized gray sweat-suit and a pair of badly skewed spectacles. Sometimes, he spoke, too, but his words were too loud to be understood. It was if he was using a worn-out megaphone to speak into, and thus his magnified voice came out staticky and distorted.

There was an old woman who lived in the building, where all her possessions served her with the understanding that she would always keep them safe. She wore her white hair in a thick braid that coiled on the back of her head, covered in a beige kerchief. She wore a welder's apron and white cotton pants, not to mention wooden-soled clogs and a sleeveless pink shirt. Like the teenage girl, she had dozens of bracelets on, although hers were clunky and made of Venetian glass beads or thick plastic instead of delicate silver filigree. She spent most of her time in the red-green room, which served as a kitchen of sorts. There was a stove and a pantry in there, and a dozen or so mismatched small tables she used as countertops. The topiary in the paisley room stood over the old woman's little sleeping cot. A Chihuly vase full of orchids and funeral lilies past their prime bloom sat next to the bed. The old woman's glasses floated in midair beside the vase, but she rarely used them. Her face had that hollow quality that told the world of an old curve, a place that was once fleshy and beautiful. She had perfect teeth.

Sometimes, a black panther would come cautiously over the river from the desert and into the heather. He was the old woman's best companion, the panther with blue eyes, because he would curl up against her when she slept, or he would circle at the girl on the swing, or he would lie on one of the tables in her kitchen and watch her as she cooked. He had the most beautiful eyes; they haunted her. They were the same color as the girl's on the swing, but his eyes were a cat's eyes and framed with his black fur. He did not have a feline's grace, and the old woman was not upset because she did not have much of a woman's grace. She imagined that he was content to be a misfit, and so must she be to be as happy as he.

She used color carelessly sometimes, the old woman did. The orange room, where there was lots of water in all its forms, she had taken a boar-hair brush and dipped it in a pot of boiling oil, and she smeared it across the yellow walls. It discolored the paint to a deep umber in places. In others, the paint peeled away from the plaster and lath and fell to the low pile carpet below. It scorched the wood trim and turned it dark brown. The ceiling was painted with an ocean of sunflowers and poppies and tiger lilies. The old woman loved lilies and had them all over her house.

"What's God to you?" asked a voice from the radio on the floor in the orange room. "Are you God? Is there a God?" The old woman stood in the doorway between the orange and paisley rooms. The old woman didn't question the fact that she was no longer useful and it must have been that she was alive solely because whatever God she was meant to revere didn't want her yet. It had been a very long time since she contemplated that idea; she decided that she was just too old to worry about it much.

There was a large bird that lived in a cardboard tomato sauce crate near the riverbank. It had a foul smell to it, and no feathers. Its skin was black but it wasn't otherwise terribly ugly. Its purpose was to monitor visitors to the old woman's heather field, to make sure they didn't stay too long. A visitor overstaying his or her welcome disrupted the balance in the field. The clocks the line the walls in the paisley room would go haywire or stop all together. The old woman no longer had the stamina to go around and fix them all.

Sometimes, although never when the panther came, a woman with square spectacles and a magnificent green sequined gown would come to see the old woman. They sat in the sunny orange room, where it smelled of paint always and occasionally chocolate and had the dry heat of Oklahoma. It was a much different climate from the cool humidity of the paisley room, and the cozy warmth of the kitchen room. The old woman wondered sometimes if the woman in the gown and the panther were the same person, but even she knew it was silly. The woman in the gown asked her stupid questions and gave her the food she cooks, as well as lovely recipes to try out, and she cut her hair sometimes. Sometimes the old woman felt intruded upon and the clocks began to stop ticking in the next room, one by one. Before long, much shorter periods of time than the panther was allowed, the bird would leave its cardboard roost and fly in carrion circles over the fields, crying its death cry, signaling the end of the visit. She never felt intruded upon by the panther, but he never asked her anything at all.

The old woman, always hearing the cry first, would jump to her feet, screaming. The bird's cries unsettled her and frightened her, even though she depended on the creature to keep her safe.

The green-gowned woman would never hear the bird but the old woman screaming would send her running, back across the heather and across the bridge and back to the desert from which she came. The old woman resented the green-gowned woman because there were always large gaps of time between that woman's visits and the panther's, as though the panther was afraid to invade the old woman's fragile sanctuary. She wished she spoke panther, so she could tell him that if she had her own way, he would stay with her always. Alas, she did not speak panther, and he never overstayed his welcome. He always bowed out before the bird had a chance to rouse itself. This tact he possessed might have been what endeared him so much to the old woman, because she never associated him with the fear that came from the bird's cries.

"I don't know his name," she murmured to herself one day when he did not come, sitting on the floor in the red-green room, where it was black tile.

When the second sun, the one in the northern part of the sky, would set in the evening, the woman would know it was time to go outside and make sure the girl was all right, and that the boy had sat down. If they weren't, she wasn't sure what she would do, because they always were. They operated on the same timetable she did and never let her down. Once assured they were perfect, she would go back and lie down on her cot in the paisley room. Her bedspread was emerald green and purple paisley, and the carpets were blue and gold like the feathers of some exotic parrot. Once, the panther forgot himself and slept the whole night in the paisley room with her, curled up on the floor while she took the tiny cot by herself. She awoke early in the morning, when the cool red sun was at its zenith, but said nothing, preferring to watch him lie there, breathing so silently. When she woke again, he was gone.

When a stranger who was not the panther or the woman in the green sequins would dare to cross the bridge, the bird went crazy. The old woman's entire world was built upon a certain structure, and disruptions to that balance were reacted to very badly. She would fly into a sort of fit in the presence of a stranger. At first, she had with the woman in green, but the woman had persistence and eventually she learned to tolerate her presence. She was used to her dropping in every so often after so long. There wasn't trauma in her visits so much any more, although it happened when the woman overstayed her short welcome. The gatekeeper bird did not trust the younger woman.

Once, a man all dressed in a white tuxedo came over the bridge, bearing a tray of live sea scallops, still in their shells, struggling vainly against the air. She had freaked out completely at the sight of the scallops' suffering. She grabbed the nearest thing, a chair from the paisley room, one made of metal, and had broken it against the wall. She had attacked him, trying to save the scallops. Once he was out and bleeding, she took up the tray and dumped them into the salty river that protected her field from the desert landscape beyond.

She had never ventured onto the bridge or gone on to the desert. She could never see it very well, even though it was very close. There were indistinct shapes moving always, quickly through the corridors between the dunes. Most of them wore the same shade of green as the woman in the sequined dress. Some wore white that matched her pants. There was a gleaming reflective surface she could see reflecting the suns' lights from her window, and she suspected that this was where the panther lived and watched her from afar. She couldn't imagine why he would live in a ball of light, but it suited his rich, dark fur. She couldn't look for long at the bridge or the light, though, because it reminded her of something she couldn't quite remember.

Her memory was a hazy maze that was like Swiss cheese or a bone stricken with osteoporosis. There were lots of gaps and only strands of structure left in inconvenient places. There was one image, of a dead man with brilliant but vacant green eyes and hair like the boy on her roof, and another of a man with red hair and an evil smile and so much green light coming towards her. There was one of a grayscale picture on a small screen, some indistinct blob moving and the distinct pang of utter happiness and the feeling of someone clutching her hand and the alien chill of liquid on her belly. Another image was of a castle on a hill, lit up with millions of candles inside. In one, a girl she doesn't know was dancing with a dark-haired stranger. There was one of a man's purring voice telling her he loved her, but one of the gaps stole his face from her.

Behind the building was an orchard of peach trees and a grape arbor and rows of yellow and pink rose bushes. She hadn't tended the plots in years and they had the overgrown look of any haunted house's gardens. They were once ordered and beautiful, she could vaguely remember. She used to stroll them without a care. But she had grown afraid to venture inside for fear there be monsters lurking amongst the vines and thorns and blooms. The orchids and dying lilies inside her paisley room were quite enough to sustain her need for beauty.

One morning, for morning she measured by the yellower of the two suns, she ventured to the bridge to look out at the desert, but she strayed too near the bird's box. It came out and perched on top, watching her with its watery eyes, as if not sure what she might do. She thought that perhaps saw the hazy outline of a woman with red hair standing on the road leading to the bridge, and a very small girl who looked exactly like the teenage girl back on the swing, standing with the panther, who looked distressed.

Why the panther had any reason to be distressed was beyond the old woman, who took this as a bit of an insult. "I'm not doing this for you!" she called in a reasonable tone, considering she was not sure if the sound could penetrate beyond the borders of her field. But it didn't matter any more because she couldn't see them any more. The light was too bright and it obscured everything she might have thought she had seen.

She went outside and looked up at the boy on the roof. He was holding the turtle up towards the sky, his brow set in grim determination. "Would you like some breakfast?" he asked the turtle in a reasonable tone. "I'm sure she's made some sausages. Would you like some sausages?"

The old woman imagined that the turtle was saying in a plain, bored voice, "No, I wouldn't care for some sausages. I'm a turtle and turtles don't like sausages." It took her a moment, and then it occurred to her that turtles don't speak. In any case, she knew the point was moot because the boy never left the roof for food, and the turtle never left the boy's arms.

She turned back to the river and the desert and squinted at the light, which had dimmed somewhat. Not for the first time, she wondered what might be on the other side of the water, but she had never asked her visitors, and she had never gone past the tree where the girl with blue eyes sat on her swing.

The girl was speaking, but the old woman couldn't hear her. Her feet were bare, her turquoise-painted toenails skimming the hard-packed dirt under the swing. But one thing was wrong with the picture. The girl had looked up, her blue eyes fixed intently on the old woman. A tear worked its way down the girl's cheek, and her lips were moving frantically. The woman squinted and realized with a start that one of the images in the tunnels of her memory was of watching a bearded old man explaining how to read lips.

"You are not brave," the girl was saying as she cried. "You let it hurt you and you shouldn't have. He tells me that you were so wonderful but you aren't. You aren't. You're nothing but a shape. You're nothing but a ghost."

"I'm not doing this for you!" she shrieked at the girl, but the damage was done. She stumbled backwards, off of the neatly trimmed grass path and into a stand of heather. She clutched her heart and closed her eyes. She struggled to her knees and turned her face towards the light. "I'm declining!" she shouted to it, thinking only of the girl on the swing. "I'm declining." She broke off and fell back to the ground, the pale purple buds on the plants smacking her in the face. "I swear I will!" she screamed to the sky overhead.

She peeled herself off of the ground and ran into the house, through the paisley room and into the red-green one. On the glass-top table in the center was a tureen of lumpy gravy and a plate of neatly cut-up meat. Her one utensil was set out next to the plate. She stared at it.

Later, in the evening, she lay down on her cot and mourned that the panther had failed to visit her that day. She could see the light through the curtain over the door, which her bed faced, and it glowed as it always did. But it was evening, the only time of day when both of the suns were dimmed, and as they both disappeared, the light across the river diminished as well.

When it was gone, she would close her eyes, comforted.

"There aren't any lights in the world," she whispered before she slept.

000

Autumn's Monologue (From Autumn to Ashes)

Can't Not (Alanis)

Amen (Jewel)

Honestly Okay (Dido)

You Could Make a Killing (Aimee Mann)

I Know (Fiona Apple)

000

Dedicated to nobody because I'm not in the mood.

Posted 24 September, 2004 (written 13 July 2004)

--tinhen


End file.
